Books that I talked about on "Building the Lean Web Development Team" 14/10/09

This is a list of the books that I talked about on the "Beta" course I ran in Bristol on 14/10/09. I'm writing this list out so that I can send it to the attendees, but I also thought it would be good to share it here.

The Machine That Changed The World

This is the book that started off my investigations into Lean and it's well worth a read, even though, I think Womack and Jones, who've gone on to write several further books, have changed their thinking a lot since they wrote this.

The thing I particularly like about it is the unimpressed view of western manufacturing from a Japanese perspective.

Taiichi Ohno, the Toyota Production System

The grandaddy. The dude.

I'm wary of treating any book as a hallowed text, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in this one. Even more interesting than the specific content is the approach. It take vision to look at the huge success of Ford's mass production system and say "Naw, we're not going to do that, we're going to do something different."

One way of thinking about Lean approaches is that they are a process of "Learning to See", another is that progress comes through continually looking at what you are doing and asking "What is it? What is it?". I think Taiichi Ohno might have been one of the few people ever who really understood what a car factory was.

Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation

This is a later book from Womack and Jones with detailed case studies of several companies that have adopted Lean methods in order to improve their performance, including Porsche.

Zero Quality Control: Source Inspection and the Poka-Yoke System

Again, the main benefit of the thinking in this book is its difference in approach. This time to catching and fixing mistakes, not by yelling at staff to be better, but by working to improve the system.

Mary and Tom Poppendieck: Lean Software Development, an Agile Toolkit

I haven't yet read this all the way through, but it looks very good. The only issue that I have with it is that it's software oriented, and part of the point of the course yesterday was to question whether web development is actually software-oriented, or actually something entirely, or considerably different.

Martin Fowler: Re-factoring - Improving the Design of Existing Code.

A good book to look at when you're trying to think of Poka Yoke methods to mistake-proof your operations.

Gary Klein, Sources of Power.

Used this as a source for a value-generation exercise that we did: got people to tell stories about their expertise.




For further information, contact mark.stringer@gmail.com (07736 807 604)

The Innovation Edge

The Innovation Edge, Nesta's 18 monthly conference, took place on 20th May 2008 at the Festival Hall. Jonathan Kestenbaum, Nesta's Cheif Executive, was determined to show just how far the organisation has moved on under his stewardship by reflecting on the difference between this gathering and the last one at The Business Design Centre in Islington in 2006, shortly after he took the reigns. I am not in a position to comment on whether Nesta is a very different beast to its previous incarnation, but if the key note speakers on show are anything to go on then they certainly seem to have moved up a league.

The key note session was chaired by Jonathan Freedland and began with Jonathan interviewing none other than Sir Tim Burners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. Sir Tim appeared every bit the modest unassuming and selfless socially motivated scientist that you one might expect from the person who invented arguably the most important innovation since the industrial revolution. He jokingly reminisced how his initial proposal to create the www was described by his manager at CERN as being 'vague but interesting' and how he was only able to work on it in down time between his important work.

Sir Tim was followed by Bob Geldof (no hyper link required) who stole the show with a witty, invigorating and critical speech that seamlessly bridged the conference theme of sustaining UK innovation with a call to arms on how innovation can do so much more to help people in Africa work their way out of poverty. He made the point that Europe should do more to use its innovation capital to help Africa. He reflected despite the fact Africa lies just 8 miles off the southern coast of Spain and Europe remains the richest continent in the world, China is investing so much more in Africa that European nations.

The afternoon began in similar big hitter style with none other than Gordon Brown providing 10 minutes of surprisingly relaxed informal comment and even a couple of jokes in support of UK innovation.

If Nesta is able to become as good as the speakers on show in effecting positive change and sustaining innovation then they really will have moved a long way in the last 18 months. I look forward to seeing how they appear in another 18 months time.

Making creative and business sit together with less conflict

One of the big questions raised time and time again by those involved in supporting and developing creative businesses is why it is that creative people are so good (and prolific) at starting businesses but not so good at sustaining and growing them?

Many more businesses are started by creative practitioners than those from a business background. Creative businesses are responsible for more new job creation than any other area of economic activity in the UK. London is a world powerhouse of creative business and yet despite this the failure rate of creative businesses is very high and of those that make it past the 3 year mark, many never grow beyond a dozen or so employees.

While there are a multitude of reasons given for this, such as the unwillingness of those that run such businesses to break through the 'lifestyle' barrier needed to grow or sustain a business to the difficulty in accessing investment, there is an important factor that is common to most, if not all, such businesses. This is the conflict between creative process and business process. It is not an untruth to reflect that these two areas of discipline are simply very different and require different attitudes, skills and knowledge but to end the consideration here is also neglectful.

One way to consider the root of the creative and business conflict is to look at the way that the processes that traditionally underpin creative and business activity are shaped. Business planning and execution is understood as linear. To attract investment or secure borrowing in order to build a business so that it can be sold or can realise the long term exploitation of IP is understood to require 3 year projections that provide a month by month picture and use language that suggests risk reduction achieved through careful long term planning. Here change is to be managed rather than embraced.

Creative people are at their strongest and happiest when thinking and working cyclically, embracing risk and dealing with constant change. This is true of those engaged in the creative application of science and art. Such people make hypothesis, explore and test such hypothesis, review the results of this activity and then adjust their hypothesis accordingly. It also true that business planning should be constantly reviewed and updated in light of progress made and lessons learned. Therefore cyclical activity is also common to the ongoing delivery of such plans even if it does not make the initial research and preparation of such plans any more palatable to the creative person. It does however give us a very important pointer to finding new ways of addressing this challenge.

Clearly we need to continue developing new processes and practices for engaging business heads with creative practitioners in ways that allow them to develop long term sustainable relationships. One such process I will refer to as Agile Business Planning. By using Agile process as the basis for business planning and development delivery we allow the creative practitioner to use processes that are familiar as they are cyclical, embrace change and risk continually and yet deliver continual and visible outcome. Such process is also SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time managed) and can dovetail with the long term visioning and projection orientated nature of established business planning practice. It is simply delivered week by week, month by month, using a set of tools that are owned and understood equally well by the business head and the creative head and therefore reduce conflict allowing the creative business to grow and become sustained.

Read a Book

I've just read the excellent "Top 10 Team Practices" post in the Leading Answers blog.

I am a bit worried about leaders who "do not get the time they want or need to read about these topics." What are they doing? Do they really not have three or four hours and a few pounds (or dollars) to step back from what they're doing and get a different perspective? The best you can hope for is that they're too busy taking Agile leadership courses ;-)